After pulling an all-nighter to churn out a huge update, web novelist Lin Wei dropped dead and woke up as the most miserable outer-sect servant in the cultivation world. Spirit stones? None. Spiritual roots? Good-for-nothing. Future prospects? Bleak.
While her fellow disciples devoted themselves to sword-flying and alchemy in pursuit of immortality, Lin Wei looked at their impoverished inner lives and quietly turned to her old trade. She set up a stall in the sect plaza and began telling the story of Battle Through the Heavens.
“Thirty years east of the river, thirty years west of the river. Don’t look down on a poor young man!”
One classic line set the stagnant cultivation world ablaze. Low-ranked disciples listened, fired up with passion, while the disciplinary elder was so furious he tried to arrest her on the spot. Just when it seemed all was lost, a white-haired elder who had been stuck at a bottleneck for three hundred years suddenly let go of his obsession at the words “Don’t look down on a poor young man” and broke through on the spot!
Lin Wei turned disaster into good fortune, and from then on, there was no stopping her. She serialized stories on image-recording jade slips and pioneered paid subscriptions. A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality became a sensation, giving good-for-nothing disciples a spiritual totem. The Cultivation Chat Group went live, and memes and spirit-stone red envelopes flew everywhere.
But things gradually took a strange turn:
The aloof sword immortal senior sister pestered her for updates late at night, while the demonic sect’s saintess tipped her to change the ending. Secret realms that existed only in her fictional stories appeared in the real world, and villainous big shots earnestly studied A Villain’s Guide to Self-Salvation. As the power of her readers’ faith gathered, the plots she wrote began to disturb the cause and effect of reality...
When the orthodox Immortal Alliance listed her works as forbidden books that “corrupted the Daoist heart,” when ancient artifact spirits begged her to update, and when the fictional apocalypse she had written began to descend in secret...
Lin Wei held her carving knife and smiled at the immortals and demons of the myriad heavens.
“I can update, sure, but the tips had better be good. Besides, who says all I write are just stories?”
“Every word I write will become a... new law of this world.”
Good! 👍